It is important in electronic circuitry and packages to adequately cool large electronic boards that include multiple chips and packages mounted to the boards. In electronic systems, a heat sink or cold plate is a passive heat exchanger used to cool the multiple chips and packages by dissipating heat into the surrounding medium. For example, heat sinks and cold plates are used with high-power semiconductor devices such as power transistors and optoelectronics such as lasers and light emitting diodes (LEDs), where the heat dissipation ability of the basic device is insufficient to moderate its temperature.
A heat sink or cold plate is designed to maximize its surface area in contact with the cooling medium surrounding it, such as the air and liquid, as well as to maximize its surface area with the chip and package. In conventional systems, heat sinks or cold plates with separate air or water supplies are mounted to each chip in order to regulate heat, e.g., dissipate heat. Each heat sink or cold plate has to be individually aligned and thereafter mounted to each chip or package by a thermal interface material (TIM) such as thermal adhesives or thermal grease to improve performance by filling air gaps between the heat sink or cold plate and the device.
However, the use of separate cold plates or heat sinks becomes very problematic as chips and packages have different sizes and heights, are placed at different distances from each other and dissipate different levels of power. These different sizes, heights, etc., leads to a non-optimized cooling design leading to lower supported power levels and the need for a multitude of cooling devices. Also, each of these separate cold plates or heat sinks requiring their own separate coolant supply complicates the manufacturing process and adds additional costs.